I feel like things on Lemmy were pretty chill several months ago, and that’s started to change.

People used to talk each other like they would talk to a neighbor. Now I get the sense that people have become quick to be negative, attack, and not be constructive.

Am I crazy in feeling like the vibe has changed?

  • spaduf@slrpnk.net
    24714·
    11 months ago

    Worth noting, the number of people who come here “to escape authoritarian moderators”. Nearly all of them were moderated for good reason.

    I also don’t think the presence of places like hexbear are doing us any favors.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      924·
      11 months ago

      You can see them jumping from Lemmy server to Lemmy server as they get banned from each.

      Eventually, they’ll just set up their own instances so they can bother people with impunity.

    • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      514·
      11 months ago

      The thing that actually worried me a little bit more was people upvoting the aggressive comments to be top comments.

      I was reading some thread over at !politics@lemmy.world today, and a lot of stuff advocating for political violence were the top comments. Mods yanked it, but nevertheless, people were vibing with some comments about dragging people through the street. I felt like I was on X/Twitter.

      • spaduf@slrpnk.net
        22·
        11 months ago

        Yeah, I think it’s a legitimate and growing problem. I think a lot of folks don’t realize, but since growth has slowed from Reddit more broadly, the people who feel they have been “unfairly silenced” are the fastest growing subpopulation around here. If I’m honest, I think the only real antidote is to reestablish growth from communities with kinder dispositions.

        • Exocrinous@lemm.eeEnglish
          33·
          11 months ago

          We don’t need to take from nicer communities, we need to build nicer communities. Right now there aren’t any left wing instances, which is a big problem. It was nicer back when lib.lgbt existed.

          • spaduf@slrpnk.net
            31·
            11 months ago

            Right now there aren’t any left wing instances

            Bro what

            Also it doesn’t have anything to do with political distribution. It’s an issue of habit and disposition.

            • Exocrinous@lemm.eeEnglish
              22·
              11 months ago

              Left wing people are disposed to helping others. Right wing people aren’t. Nobody’s cultivating left wing spaces where kindness is a habit.

      • d3Xt3r@lemmy.nz
        17·
        11 months ago

        I was reading some thread over at !politics

        There you go, that’s your problem. Political topics always gets heated and brings out the worst in people, no matter the platform. The first thing I did is block all politics (and general news + sports) communities, and it’s been a fairly pleasant experience so far for me, except for the odd troll or fanboy that shows up every now and then.

        • Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee
          102·
          11 months ago

          Lemmy.nz also defederated Hexbear, which helped a lot.

          Technically they pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit” and defederated first, but whatever.

          • DrRatso@lemmy.ml
            5·
            11 months ago

            Yea, they tend to do that, think they did the same with blaahaj. Pretty funny tbh.

          • blackn1ght@feddit.uk
            31·
            11 months ago

            No it’s not. You can have casual communities or gaming or sports communities that aren’t political.

      • kromem@lemmy.worldEnglish
        198·
        11 months ago

        People like to fetishize revolution.

        Even offline I have friends that talk that kind of way and just reveal themselves as being poor students of history.

      • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
        122·
        11 months ago

        You read my mind. It’s the same feeling I got when a reddit sub would degrade into a toxic circle jerk, and I’d have to unsub. Except it feels like it’s a lot of lemmy communities lately. I feel like I can’t respectfully disagree with anyone without being met with ad hominem attacks. I don’t think something like changemyview could survive.

        Also reminds me of those anti-moderate subs, which is a sentiment literally synonymous with radicalization. I’m all for free speech, I would just rather they state whatever take they have with a calm, measured demeanor.

      • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
        8·
        11 months ago

        Well remember that any instance you federate with also gets to vote. If you feel like votes aren’t matching your values, perhaps you should try an instance with more of the “aggressive” stuff defederated.

        • Ghostalmedia@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          9·
          11 months ago

          Possibly, although those instances also have less content. I remember starting out with a BeeHaw account like many of us here. Trade off was often less content, no ability to create your own communities, but less people lashing out at each other.

          • SorteKanin@feddit.dk
            10·
            11 months ago

            Beehaw is very selective though (and that’s fine). There is a middle ground between lemmy.world and Beehaw though.

            But you said elsewhere that you go on American political communities. I’m not American but from what I’ve seen, it is hardly surprising that those places would be toxic. I think at this point, arguing US politics online seems like a lost cause. You’re probably better off discussing politics IRL.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      11 months ago

      Blocking still works though.

      It’s almost always a small amount of people causing problems.

      I still get some ghost replies occasionally, but it’s never going to be anything worth reading. Most of the toxicity comes from reply chains they start as well, so you’re not missing out on any constructive conversation.

  • Vanth@reddthat.comEnglish
    48·
    11 months ago

    More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit. I haven’t noticed too much change within the communities I’m subscribed to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been some change across all of Lemmy. It is a super niche platform that is getting more attention and drawing more general users.

    If someone were doing a school project with large dataset analysis and modeling, it would be cool to compare quantitatively the amount of positive vs negative comments a year ago compared to now.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      361·
      11 months ago

      More exposure in news and media. More asylum seekers from reddit.

      Definitely. A few months ago, there basically weren’t any crytpo-bros on Lemmy. Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.

      It’s mainly you just have more trolls and aggressive people because we’re beyond the initial group who was actually looking for more community. Admins/mods do a pretty good job of banning trolls, but not until after they’ve shitted up the place for a bit, usually.

      Also, the nature of Lemmy means that someone who gets banned for spamming an article just goes and makes an account on a different instance and then just goes and makes the same post in the same communities literally minutes later.

      Popularity is rising, the bad actors are coming. Oh well.

      • const_void@lemmy.ml
        24·
        11 months ago

        Now any time I say anything negative about crypto, about six of them jump out of the woodwork to give their big long spiel on “the useful use-cases for NFTs” which I just roll my eyes harder every fucking time over.

        This seems to correlate with the sudden rise in promotion of the Brave browser I’ve been seeing here.

        • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
          31·
          11 months ago

          Yeah I don’t trust anyone using that pedo browser. If I see that shit on their desktop they’re not getting a second date.

        • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
          171·
          11 months ago

          It’s a quality video, but I bowed out about halfway because I was already familiar with about 90% of the stuff he was discussing.

          Great source for anyone looking for a good breakdown of the whole situation.

          I usually just point to this quote from NFT co-creator Anil Dash:

          https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/

          But the NFT prototype we created in a one-night hackathon had some shortcomings. You couldn’t store the actual digital artwork in a blockchain; because of technical limits, records in most blockchains are too small to hold an entire image. Many people suggested that rather than trying to shoehorn the whole artwork into the blockchain, one could just include the web address of an image, or perhaps a mathematical compression of the work, and use it to reference the artwork elsewhere.

          We took that shortcut because we were running out of time. Seven years later, all of today’s popular NFT platforms still use the same shortcut. This means that when someone buys an NFT, they’re not buying the actual digital artwork; they’re buying a link to it. And worse, they’re buying a link that, in many cases, lives on the website of a new start-up that’s likely to fail within a few years. Decades from now, how will anyone verify whether the linked artwork is the original?

          All common NFT platforms today share some of these weaknesses. They still depend on one company staying in business to verify your art. They still depend on the old-fashioned pre-blockchain internet, where an artwork would suddenly vanish if someone forgot to renew a domain name. “Right now NFTs are built on an absolute house of cards constructed by the people selling them,” the software engineer Jonty Wareing recently wrote on Twitter.

          Meanwhile, most of the start-ups and platforms used to sell NFTs today are no more innovative than any random website selling posters. Many of the works being sold as NFTs aren’t digital artworks at all; they’re just digital pictures of works created in conventional media.

          The limited number of bits in the blockchain is a massive limitation on doing anything functional outside of bookkeeping with the crypto on the blockchain. It’s the most fundamental aspects of NFTs and it has been broken since Day One.

      • Omega_Haxors@lemmy.mlEnglish
        31·
        11 months ago

        Man one of them was trying to bring their crypto bullshit here and I fucking ripped their ass a new one. It’s probably still sore to this day.

      • HerrBeter@lemmy.world
        11·
        11 months ago

        What are you on about? If anyone is interested, read my comment history

        Edit: if we store the shitty pictures on blockchain, literally nothing changes, except a big and bulky blockchain. “I can just save the picture lmao” will still be the answer… Are we supposed to store every software on blockchain too? I don’t think it’s viable

        This article too is flawed

  • june@lemmy.worldEnglish
    47·
    11 months ago

    People have been asking this for as long as I’ve been on lemmy.

    It depends a LOT on which instances you interact with. It’s a challenge of the fediverse in that every person has their own unique experience, some bad others good.

  • Sekrayray@lemmy.world
    381·
    11 months ago

    The vibe has gotten much more negative, to the point that I don’t really want to post anymore. I came here in early June with the Reddit API stuff, and was shocked at how communal it was. It actually got me to start posting again (I hadn’t posted on Reddit since the early to mid 20-teens because it had gotten so toxic).

    My last three posts (nothing inflammatory) have gotten flamed. Someone actually hunted me down based on my post history and I had to take the time deleting most of my old posts.

    So from my perspective it’s not just you. I’m back to being a lurker.

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    33·
    11 months ago

    No you. /j

    What I found is that hot topics come with the season, in June/July about Ukraine, in July/August about Meta, in October/November about Gaza, in December about Biden. There’s been plenty of charged discussion on these topics, and internal Lemmy dramas.

    However, one thing I see more often here on Lemmy than other places is people updating their comments, being willing to admit they’re wrong or that their comment came off as hostile, and open negotiation in general. Consider the near defederation of programming.dev and lemm.ee, it was resolved amicably to everyone’s benefit.

    I also see people thanking others for softening their tone and being kind, to them I say, keep doing that and encouraging good behaviour and ettiquite online!

  • Grammaton Cleric@lemmy.world
    321·
    11 months ago

    Law of probability. The more people join, the more of a chance someone will say some stupid shit.

    Also: SUCK MY BALLS

  • forgotmylastusername@lemmy.ml
    321·
    11 months ago

    Lost among the “internet sucks now, it used to be better” discourse is that the old internet was heavily moderated. The laissez faire parts of the old internet were known as the seedy corners of the web. Social media and its modern derivatives like lemmy take on that latter philosophy.

    It’s no wonder it’s chaos every where. The libertarian tech bros have really impressed their world view on everyone. So the prevailing philosophy is these “digital town squares” should be absolute free speech zones. Except town squares in real life do not work like this anywhere. At least not in most liberal democracies. In real life there is bureaucracy. There are police, fire, ambulances. There is the simple matter of neighborly social contract. You cannot go into a real life town square and do whatever you want. You cannot just up and fight strangers, engage in lewd acts, set up encampments or what have you without permits. In the same way internet requires structure. Counter intuitively it used to have a lot more of it on account of sites being run by a real human being. Not the mega conglomerate investor groups feeding off ad/engagement profits.

    Those users unfamiliar with the old internet yet pine for the good old days would have hated it. Power hungry mods is a meme as old as the internet itself. It’s a necessity of the internet. Hardly anybody gets banned for being an asshole anymore. Sometimes (often more like) people need to be forced offline so they can go outside.

  • robocall@lemmy.world
    30·
    11 months ago

    My suspicion is that a lot of redditors migrated over here about 7 months ago when certain apps shut down, including myself. At first, they were polite in an unfamiliar environment, but they’ve grown comfortable and act out, or speak less thoughtfully, like they originally did on Reddit.